Over the past few months, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has had quite a bit of nonsense thrown it its direction, but none of it stuck (and by “stuck,” I mean the media would try to manufacture a story, no one would care, and the “controversy” would quickly fade).<\/p>\n
But the story about canned questions may actually prove to be a lasting embarrassment.<\/p>\n
Late Friday, after a report surfaced from a student newspaper in Iowa, the Clinton campaign conceded a single instance in which a member of a campaign audience was prompted on what to ask the senator. Grinnell College student Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff was reportedly pulled aside before an event and asked to pose a specific question. “They were canned<\/a>,” she said. “One of the senior staffers told me what [to ask].”<\/p>\n Campaign spokesperson Mo Elleithee explained that it was an isolated incident, and that the senator didn’t know about this in advance. “This is not standard policy and will not be repeated again,” he said.<\/p>\n Fine, so the Clinton team screwed one up. It happens. It wasn’t the first time a presidential campaign planted a question, and it certainly won’t be the last. The campaign got caught, owned up to it, and vowed not to let it happen again. No muss, no fuss.<\/p>\n Except with new details emerging, the story isn’t going away<\/a>.<\/p>\n The college student who was told what question to ask at one of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign events says “voters have the right to know what happened” and she wasn’t the only one who was planted.<\/p>\n In an exclusive on-camera interview with CNN, Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, a 19-year-old sophomore at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, said that giving anyone specific questions to ask is “dishonest,” and the whole incident has given her a negative outlook on politics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Gallo-Chasanoff also described the process of the planted question. It’s less than flattering to the campaign. The staffer suggested this wouldn’t be quite good enough, because Clinton may not be familiar enough with the other candidates’ plans. Instead, he opened a binder to a page with eight questions on it, one of which was specifically planned for a college student. (“It said ‘college student’ in brackets and then the question.”)<\/p>\n “I don’t know whether Hillary knew what my question was going to be, but it seemed like she knew to call on me because there were so many people, and … I was the only college student in that area,” she said. […]<\/p>\n “After the event,” she said, “I heard another man … talking about the question he asked, and he said that the campaign had asked him to ask that question.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n One overeager staffer planting a question is embarrassing, but a regular process is a bigger problem. Over the weekend, Geoff Mitchell, a minister who recently moved to Hamilton, Ill., from Iowa, told ABC News<\/a> that he was approached this spring by Clinton’s Iowa political director Chris Haylor to ask Clinton a question about war funding. Yesterday, Huffington reported<\/a> there was also a planted question during Clinton’s Senate campaign.<\/p>\n Now, I’m hesitant to make too<\/i> big a deal out of this. First, compared to Bush’s entirely scripted townhall meetings, a couple of planted questions seems like a minor offense. Second, Clinton doesn’t need<\/i> softball questions; her grasp of policy details is pretty impressive. Third, Clinton gets contentious questions from voters all the time, so it’s not as if every event is Kabuki theater.<\/p>\n But this is still unwelcome news for the Clinton campaign. Planted questions are wrong, and they know it. More importantly, the details suggest this was part of a common practice, not a single accident.<\/p>\n For that matter, all of this gives Edwards<\/a> and Obama<\/a> something new to criticize Clinton over — and in this case, they’re right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the past few months, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has had quite a bit of nonsense thrown it its direction, but none of it stuck (and by “stuck,” I mean the media would try to manufacture a story, no one would care, and the “controversy” would quickly fade). But the story about canned questions may […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nAs the student described it, a “senior Clinton staffer” asked if she wanted to ask the senator about energy policy. “I sort of thought about it, and I said ‘Yeah, can I ask how her energy plan compares to the other candidates’ energy plans?'” Gallo-Chasanoff said.<\/p>\n